Silence Is A Rhythm Too. Fine music blog.
Amazing Miracle Jesus Meteorite. Yours for only 250 grand—“not a joke or a hoax” (via Disturbing Auctions Daily).
Lurgi Strikes Britain. This bit of it, anyway. Bleurgh...
Pack a’ Whackers
I suppose it was only a matter of time before a fan of the gentle sport of Googlewhacking would hit one of my pages, so I wasn’t surprised to get an email to that effect a couple of weeks ago. Apparently this whacker found that a word for an unpleasant form of killing, and another for a prehistoric fish found off the Comoros, occur together only on this page (I don’t know why I’m being so secretive, because the whack no longer works, but he found it so I won’t spoil the fun). But note the sequel:
They’re turning out milksops: “If the government has any business interfering with family life ... they should be going into middle-class homes, dragging kids outside, blindfolding them and dropping them off in the middle of a forest.”
Guy Browning’s Matchbox Cars. More ’70s nostalgia—missing the battered photos from the original article, but still amusing.
John Wagner interviewed. This won’t mean much to anyone who didn’t read 2000 A.D. from 1978-1982, but I’ve been reading some reprints I picked up cheap last week (Judge Dredd, ABC Warriors; can’t wait for this). Amazing how many individual panels are imprinted on my memory.
Craig Raine on the power of words: “Mkgnao is not a proper word, runs the objection. To which there is an answer: it is now.”
Ramblin’ Band
There’s something depressingly familiar about half of the reviews of Lemon Jelly’s newie, ’64-’95. “Wallpaper music”, “inoffensive”, “soulless”: depressing, because they’re so at odds with my impression of the album; and familiar, because I heard it all before during my days as an Oldfield obsessive (the irony being that I’d use the same terms to describe some of his newer releases, but that’s as maybe).
It’s irritating to see people bag the Jelly’s packaging as some kind of “brand loyalty” exercise (when they’ve said in interviews that it loses them money, but they just like doing it) while missing the entire point of the music. Lemon Jelly, like our Mike, are all about the build and the uplift; about creating musical landscapes you’d happily lose yourself in.
Read More · 
20 March 2005 · 
· Music
Wes Anderson profiled in the Graun. The Life Aquatic is brilliant, in case you haven’t seen it yet.
So, I’ve got this mobile. (I know, at last. Jane gave me one for Christmas because her number one texting friend was about to move to Boston. My Mobile Tracking Device, she calls it.) And there I was, sitting in the passenger seat as I caught a lift back to Edinburgh with Fiona, admiring the snowy landscape of the Borders beneath the peach skies of mid-afternoon, composing a txt with the edge of my thumb.
“You text like an old person,” says Fiona.
Drawn! A collaborative blog for “anyone who likes to draw”.
Dombo interviews Graeme Garden. One of the fun things about being in the UK is hearing the ex-Goodies pop up on various Radio 4 comedy quizzes.
CiteULike: del.icio.us for online papers. Every academic blogger seems to be linking to this, so I will too.
The Speedysnail Feeds will be working a bit differently this year. Main entries only, brief links only, or both in one.
A Redesign for Life
There comes a time when any further tinkering with Movable Type templates and plug-ins, and upgrading MT because the plug-ins won’t work, and considering switching to WordPress but not having the time to figure it out, and trying to get the links blog to appear in the main blog, and testing out all of the various archives, and coming up with a way of having some entries display with a title and some without yet still giving those without an individual archive, and getting the whitespace around every possible permutation and combination of posts right, and trouble-shooting link styles in CSS, and tweaking the background image so that the snail is in just the right position for people to realise there’s a mouseover menu next to it, and wondering where to put the old “Aussie Blogs” link in the bottom menu without messing up the layout, then deciding it’s easier just to drop it because who follows blog-ring links these days anyway, and hoping the whole thing looks tolerable on IE for Windows, and getting sick to death of the whole thing before you’ve even started using it, all have to be put to one side and the big button that says “save” decisively pressed.
Read More · 12 March 2005 · · Site News